A bit about music, a bit about life and a bit about my thoughts.

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A few months ago I was at a musical event and there was a purse snatching. This was something I has heard about and somehow thought I would never see some thing like this.

I have often been advised by friends who see my purse hanging open as I walk down the street that I am inviting a purse snatching. I have a grip on the purse and think it will not happens to me and so far it hasn’t. This incident had made me aware and careful.

The evening started normally. The house band do the first set and musicians came in to join in on the second set. This evening it was talking with a friend who plays saxophone. He got his horns out and set them on a booth in the front which is usually vacant since the musicians are not visible from that booth. I had seen most of the people in the bar although some not enough to have a conversation.

The sax player ad I were talking when he looked over to the booth with his horns and noticed a young man looking at his horns. Musicians are always very protective of their instruments so he yelled at he guy to move. He did. This was someone we hadn’t seen before. My friend asked the bartender and she hadn’t seen him either. When he went up to play he asked me to watch his horns.

The evening went on and the new guy moved from place to place around the bar. This particular bar is long and thin. It has a 50 foot oak bar on the left as you walk in and tables and booths to the right. He sat at several seats at the bars, a booth and just stood in the back. He began to slip into the background as I listened to the music.

One of the women in the bar slipped Into the back of the front booths and had her belongs including her purse towards the wall so it was “safe”. The guy reached over the booth as snatched the purse. I didn’t see it. What I did see was the woman running out of the bar.

When she came back in, she was sobbing. The music stopped. Within a minute, the band knew what had happened. The band and several other men ran from the bar immediately. Everyone had noticed the new guy.

After about twenty minutes, the guys began to come back. They found the guy and held him down while someone else got the police. The bar is right next to the police main station and with a Tiger baseball game that evening, there were quite a few in the area. By the time they got him, the purse was gone and the guy insisted the musicians were wrong. The police asked him to empty his pockets in front of the woman who lost the purse and he had her keys and phone in his pocket. He was arrested.

The guy who came back was the one who held him down and had cut his finger in the process and told us what had happened. The other guys were helping the woman look for her purse and other things that had been scattered. Her purse and most of the things in the purse were recovered.

I was so surprised and pleased how fast the band and others came to her defense. The women in the bar comforted the woman. Since that time, I have been so much more careful with my purse.